Greedy Goblin

Wednesday, March 9, 2016

Broker fees and transaction taxes: Malcanis law in action

For a market trade to happen, someone has to create a non-immediate order and pay broker fee to do so. Then someone else comes and accepts it with an immediate order and then the seller pays tax. So every market transaction pays a broker fee and a transaction tax. The only way to avoid that is to not trade in the market. Either run the whole production chain by yourself or trade only with contracts and via corp hangars. The problem is that such actions need deeper involvement in the game, so these fees hit casual players much more than large industrialist. Sending ore to your manufacturer alt has no fee, selling to a stranger pilot does.

While every transaction pays a broker fee, its place can be shifted. The "dumb guy" only buys from sell orders and sell to existing buy orders, never pays a single dime of fee. Of course this is advised against as you'll always buy high and sell low. The "smart guy" sells his products via sell order and buys his materials via buy orders: he pays the broker fee for his transactions. Finally, there are traders who set up both buy and sell orders, waiting for a dumb guy to fill the buy order, so they can relist it (same station or somewhere else) for a profit. They pay for the broker fees of the dumb guys.

The problem with that can be seen on the February economic report. The sinks and faucets show 5.89T Broker Fees and 9.82T Transaction tax payed. Their ratio is 0.6:1. What's wrong with that? On Jita I currently pay 0.75% Transaction tax and 0.2% Broker fee, that's 0.27:1 ratio. I, a dedicated trader spend much less on broker fees than the average. On the one hand it's normal, a dedicated PvP-er has better destroyed:lost ratio than the average guy.

On the other hand increasing Broker fee is very-very Malcanis law. Why? Because someone who wants to sell has two options: sells himself via sell order or sells to a buy order of a trader. In the first case he pays the broker fee. In the second, the trader pays it for him, but takes the profit between buy and sell orders. By increasing his broker fee, the first option becomes less viable. My broker fee will remain fine, due to the high effort I put into it. If the difference between buy and sell orders is smaller than your broker fee, the smart option is to use the immediate order instead of setting up yours. Actually, you should do it even if the margin is larger than the fee but not "enough" large, since the immediate order pays immediately and needs no later updating which are conveniences worth paying for. With a large increase to the fees, established traders with proper trading pilots and enough ISK to set the orders will make a killing, since everyone without high standings has to sell to us.

Dear CCP, you already made us very rich with the injectors/extractors. Maybe you shouldn't make us mandatory in every trade between casual players. Maybe. Also, maybe you could have a trading focus group because the CSM won't tell you any of these as most of them have little clue about the market, and the rest will not interrupt you making them stupidly rich. Also, I'd like to point out how harmful it is for anyone starting to trade: until you have the high standings, you can't make money. First grind for a month and only then you can start your career as a trader. I understand that inflation must be controlled, but maybe limiting the ISK prints would be better than driving the casual guys to our slaughterhouse.

Finally, before some dumb guy would mention, no one in his right mind will trade in a citadel in highsec (where most of the trading is done), unless you set the fees to stupidly high ranges. While people already contemplate over such dumbly placed citadels being sieged just for the lols by Goons and others, this isn't the biggest threat, as you can recover your assets from a destroyed citadel. No, the big grief would be Goons and similarly nice people operating a 0% fee citadel to lure people there and when enough assets are on sale in their citadel, just deadzone it and defend it from destruction, locking the assets of everyone inside it like they did with Nulli, except they just have to show up once a week to defend instead of hellcamping it all week. Imagine the tears if all the Jita trillions would be locked into a Goon citadel? Well, people imagined their own tears, so they will never leave the NPC stations.

19 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Just Burn/Camp the Jita 4/4 undock, point the victims to the new citadel which does not have hellcamp. You can charge a fee and screw over everybody. Based on the trillions traded in Jita should not take too long to pay for itself times over. Since there are no capital ships damage dealers in high-sec, it just comes down who has the greater numbers. And guess who that is?

It's completely impossible to camp Jita. There are too many people to kill to have any impact. No one has manpower to do that. Just remember "Burn Jita"s. Goons killed a handful of freighters, while most people didn't even know anything is happening.

You raise a good point about griefing citadels though. Similar things happened with Pi when they became player owned. Its exactly like high sec player corps v npc player corps.

face it the CCP devs are a bunch of griefers who made a game where they can greif people and everything is designed to grief people for the lols. If your playing in high sec and your NOT in an npc corp your doing it wrong.

Anyone attempting to trade assets out of a station they don't own instead of an npc station? doing it wrong...

I am however buying shares in my local popcorn company. Its going to be very fun to watch all the idiots.

ps I have no idea what on earth yr capctha is about gevlon but its very weird.

Even if it's true (and I wouldn't take WingspanTT as an authorative source), it wouldn't help another - non-griefing - option: you can lock out selectively those who are undercutting you. Buyers are welcome, little guys who just sell a few items are tolerated, but competitive traders are not. So everyone who is not them are encouraged to keep Jita alive by not leaving it even when it's temporarily possible or even profitable.

I mean if someone wants to make big money, he first set up a citadel in Urlen for 0% fee, and when Jita is dead, he just gets rid of all big competitors, gauge 5% fee from little guys (they'd pay the same in Jita) and get very rich.

People aren't really "dumb guys" for buying and selling instantly, they just need their time more than they need the additional few % the item or released liquidity costs them. Remember that not everything in the game is about isk, and if groups like moa spent all of their time babysitting their market orders they'd never get out and fight goons.

Selling to buy orders dumb? Only if buy/sell gap is too big and quantity/price makes it worthwhile. Mass selling bunch of modules that accumulated over time is more profitable than setting sell orders for each. I can very well see people selling off bunch of crap, even if it includes a faction module or two.